New Anti-Social Narrative, They’re Exploiting Users for Greedy Profit

I am excerpting from this article not so much because of the ‘straight news’ it contains, but to highlight another emerging narrative intended to convince you, the American ‘voter’ to not just accept, but DEMAND that the state do something about controlling the dangers of social media. This will involve heavy regulations designed to enable the state to control another means of communication, social media. But they will do so with our safety in mind, of course.

The narrative is that social media is unjustly exploiting its users to simply profit, greedily, off of their private information, knowing what they are doing is ultimately hurting their users. Here, you have one of the earliest salvos in that new emerging anti-social-media narrative.

With more than 2 billion users, Facebook’s reach now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam. However, the network’s laser focus on profits and user growth has come at the expense of its users, according to one former Facebook manager who is now speaking out against the social platform.

“One of the things that I saw consistently as part of my job was the company just continuously prioritized user growth and making money over protecting users,” the ex-manager, Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook for 16 months, starting in 2011, told NBC News. During his tenure at Facebook, Parakilas led third-party advertising, privacy and policy compliance on Facebook’s app platform.

As Facebook transitioned from a Harvard dorm-room project into one of the world’s most valuable companies, its power grew in ways that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg never could have anticipated.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv